Back in the 80s we were just guessing most of the time. At least until Akira was released in the United States in 1988 and only then white people started realizing there was a market.
this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2025
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This happened both ways! An excerpt from the wiki page of Hidetaka Miyazaki, director of Dark Souls and Elden Ring amongst other things:
Miyazaki was an avid reader as a child despite his parents being unable to afford him many books. He frequently borrowed from his local library, including English language fantasy and science fiction that he did not fully understand, allowing his imagination to fill in the blanks by using the accompanying illustrations. He would later cite that as a major influence on his design philosophy.
So in other words, Dark Souls lore is the way it is for the same reason
Anime was a breath of fresh air in the 80s and 90s. The mechs were amazing. The aesthetic was different from what we'd grown up with. The shows were more adult than kids/teens got to see at the time.
I can totally understand why Maximum Mike would have done that.
American animation grew up with smooth, muscled superheroes singlehandedly saving the country/world/galazy/universe/multiverse, but there wasn't much interpersonal story or character growth -- the heroes were generally already solid and unchanging.
Anime broke that up in every way. The main character ter wasn't always the hero, lots of characters in each story changed quite a bit throughout it, and the aesthetics were completely different between mechs and superheroes.
I think you may have a bit of sampling bias. The only animes that were worth importing to the US, or watching years after their release, are the good ones. If you lived in the US in the 80's or 90's and were a boy, most cartoons available to you would be stuff like Captain planet or GI Joe, but there were other cartoons in existence in the US. Character growth was still lacking, but girl's cartoons followed the assumption that girls wanted TV shows where people talk about their feelings, such as care bears or my little pony.
I think what you're talking about is the degree of serialization of cartoons. American cartoons mostly had self-contained episodes where everything reverts to the status quo at the end of an episode. This was so the children watching didn't have to construct a timeline of they had seen the episodes out of order. Well regarded anime, on the other hand, was highly serialized which allowed for character growth across multiple episodes and was less restrictive.
I haven't really dived into anime mostly for lack of time. But the way you put it reminds me of the way the Worm universe is everything except black and white.
You had to do that anyway with the ones that did get official translations since they were edited so heavily. You'd be lucky if the plot stayed intact enough to follow the original storyline. I thought they were just extra surreal until I watched the originals with subtitles years later.